Page 38 of Tempting the Teammate
I choked on a sip of beer. “Fuck, I hope they didn’t. I only ever skimmed the texts.”
He drank from his can and settled in his seat, his leg pressed against mine as he folded it on the bed. “What do you want us to do, Andrei?”
“Why me?” I asked, a frown creasing my brow.
“It’s just that you had a lot longer to think about it,” Griffin said without teasing. “Do you want to talk about that? Do you want to…not? Whatever you say.”
I closed my eyes to find some sort of balance between the many warring emotions that battled within my chest. “I don’t have those answers, Griff. I want…” And I pictured it as clearly as I could. What would it look like, this thing of ours, if it were real? “I want us to be the way we always were,” I said and looked at Griffin.
He pulled a face of mock concern. “Platonic?”
I snorted and punched his leg. “Minus that.” And even hinting at it made my stomach flutter like a hummingbird. I fidgeted, accidentally rubbing our legs together, then remembered that he didn’t mind that. Not that he had evercared. We’d always had that liberty to touch one another, but as years had gone by, every touch hurt me precisely because he had been so oblivious to its importance.
“What else?” Griffin asked.
I hid my face behind the beer while taking another sip. “I want things to be normal between us, Griff. I’ve wanted this—something like this—for way too long, and I don’t want that to be the center of things.”
“How so?” he asked.
I thought about it, then nodded to myself. “If we take it too seriously, I’m afraid it’ll replace our friendship. But if we don’t take it seriously enough, what are we?”
“And if we find the balance, it could be a lot of fun,” Griffin said.
Then a new fear uncoiled in my stomach. Griffin had been into me for a week, and I had been into him for almost a decade. I had always known that I would belong to him for the rest of my days, but Griffin had a history of chasing after the latest fascination.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked, and there was no mistaking the tiny undertone of fear in his voice.
“I just…” God, this was difficult. Couldn’t I just keep kissing him? Why couldn’t we do all the things our hearts wanted and not worry about the real world? “Griff, I don’t know how that’s going to work. I’ve never dated anyone. You’ve dated everyone for a little bit. We’re totally different.”
He drew a deep breath of air and nodded with understanding. “I could promise that this is it, but you won’t believe me. Hell, I wouldn’t believe me. Maybe you never dated anyone because you were waiting for this. Maybe I dated everyone around us because I didn’t know that this was possible. There’s no way of knowing, Andrei. But I know one thing.” I leaned in as if I needed to hear him better. He set the beer onthe table and turned to face me completely, also leaning in. His face was big and open and wonderful, eyes wide and inviting, lips red from all the kisses and bites. “Andrei, I’ve never felt this way about anyone. Nobody’s ever made me this hot and uncomfortable, and I mean that in the best way possible. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s not letting me sleep at night.” He smiled a little brighter for a moment. “And you feel that way, too.”
I nodded. It was impossible not to admit it when I finally had the chance to be honest about it. Except he didn’t know the whole truth. He didn’t know that I’d once made a collage of our photos that looked an awful lot like a wedding day picture. He didn’t know that I’d whispered his name into the pillow at the climax of every sexual exploration of my life. He didn’t know that he had been my soulmate for years and would remain my soulmate for the rest of my life.
I had lived in peace with the fact that I would watch him conquer every challenge, watch him get away from me, while I stayed with the sweet memories of us cannonballing into the pool and accidentally ending up in a tangle of limbs and flesh and bare skin on skin—the closest we’d ever gotten to a kiss until tonight. And while I cherished the memories of him running his hand through my hair comfortingly the first time we’d gotten drunk on beer and I puked.
“Not letting ourselves see where this goes would be madness,” Griffin said, fidgeting again and folding both legs under his ass until he was kneeling right in front of me. He had that wicked grin of his that always made me want to see a bad idea through.
I folded my lips, licked them, and nodded. “Rules, then.”
Griffin looked at me as if I were the cutest thing he’d ever seen. “Go on.”
I drew a deep breath through my nose and looked into his eyes, swearing him to these rules by nothing more than a thought. “If you have any doubts, tell me. If you realize this was all some kind of trance or passing infatuation, you have to tell me, Griff. You’ve never…I don’t even know how this works. So if you, I dunno, don’t feel like you’re into guys anymore, just say it. I don’t want you to push me away like you did the last few weeks because you don’t know how to say something.”
“I promise,” Griffin said, a note of worry creasing the skin around his eyes. He hadn’t thought of this. He hadn’t thought of it passing the same way it had hit him.
“Sexuality can be weird, Griff,” I said. “I’ve been gay my whole life. I’ve never looked at a girl and thought I could be any closer to her than in a platonic way.”
He nodded. “What else?”
I thought about it for a moment and decided to ask rather than tell, although I knew the answer. “Do we tell anyone?”
The way his eyes widened for an instant was the answer and not a surprise. “I think it might be too soon.”
“I agree,” I said. “Everyone’s watching us, there are cameras, and we don’t want to fuel the stories.”
He chuckled. “That ship has sailed, and we’ve been shipped right with it.”
“Well, people can have their wishful thinking. We’ll keep the real thing for ourselves,” I said.
